Clark
by The Pea Pod in the Pumpkin Pie
Summary: Most people are not the perfect Kents or the evil Luthors. Most people are somewhere in between. Martha Kent has a half sister named Amelia Clark. What if Clark wasn't raised... by the Luthors or the Kents? What if he wasn't Clark Kent at all? A different take on the "Clark raised by someone else" idea. Eventual M/M and M/F.
1. Chapter 1

1.

Amelia Clark spent most of that year ferrying between her dying father and her dying relationship with her boyfriend, which was about the most stereotypical line in history but there you had it.

Her dying father, a wealthy Metropolis City lawyer and stockbroker, lay in his big house alone, stubbornly refusing treatment for cancer as he grew pale and thin and all his hair started falling out. Amelia looked after him, reminding him that he should accept treatment about once a week, changing his bedsheets and cleaning his naked wrinkled body as delicately as she could. He didn't talk much and she pretended to understand that. Amelia felt she was the kind of person who would only fully realize how little contact she'd kept with other people when she was dying, and she'd always thought her father was the same sort of person, but then maybe he was and he'd just given up.

Amelia was her father's favorite daughter, in spite of the fact that her mother had divorced him, used the money to buy about a thousand silk scarves, and moved to Manhattan. (Neither of them had ever heard from her again.) He'd had another daughter, Martha, with his first wife, but then his first wife had died and Martha had left Metropolis and married a poor farmer for love and their father had never spoken to her again. Amelia, who was far less pretty but stubbornly single, who had gone to college twice - once to study art history and law and become a lawyer deciding which ancient art went to which art museums, and once again to study linguistics and business and become an interpreter for hire for various corporations, mostly out of a sense of boredom with her father's law practice - became the winning child who got to clean her father's bedsheets at the end of his life.

When she wasn't at work or cleaning up after her father, she was usually calling her boyfriend and leaving messages on his answering machine. He was a musician and she'd fallen in love with his long-fingered, callused hands and his romantic lyrics and his tattoos and then she'd found out he smoked weed like Amelia drank coffee and only ever called her if he wanted to have sex. Occasionally he did make an effort to try to be more of a boyfriend, making her think each time that there was some glimmer of hope in their relationship. Once he'd taken her to the ballet because he knew she liked it, another time he'd taken her on a picnic, and when she'd said her father was dying he'd said sympathetically, "Wow, that's too bad."

But mostly she called him and he never called her back and then sometimes he came over, had sex, had a smoke, and left. All of Amelia's friends hated him. "I think you just like him because he does concerts at your favorite coffee shop," Amy had been the one kind (or cruel) enough to point out. But Amy didn't have much room to talk; she and everybody else knew her husband regularly cheated on her and she never said a word about it to anybody, including her husband.

On the day her father died, Amelia was standing in his house's foyer, calling Ash (the boyfriend; she was pretty sure by now that it was not his original name). She left another message. "Hey, it's just me. Call me when you get a chance. Bye." She hung up. She always felt bad leaving uncomplicated messages, like he'd be more likely to call if she left a heartfelt one, but she'd tried the heartfelt messages and they'd never done anything so after a while she got tired of them and stopped.

Amelia's father always said, rather cruelly, that Ash was only dating Amelia because there was no chance she'd ever get pregnant. When she'd found out from the doctor that she was barren - a lovely little trait taken from her father's side of the family - she'd cried a good deal and Ash had hugged her and seemed sympathetic and it had almost been like they were in a real relationship. But he'd seemed relieved and had sex a good deal more frequently after that. Amelia thought her father was probably right about Ash, but she wasn't going to say that and inflate his ego any further, cancer or no cancer.

It sounded horrible, but only to someone who didn't know Amelia's father. He was kind of an asshole, but in that cold-blooded, classy, dignified way that made you love him in spite of his faults.

She went upstairs, walked into his bedroom, and said, "He hasn't called me back yet. Gloat all you want." He lay still and silent and she thought he was asleep. It took her about fifteen minutes, when she finally shook him to wake for orange juice and Eggs Benedict on a tray, to realize he'd died while she was in the other room. She sat next to his bed and watched him for a while, holding his hand. She was pretty sure you were supposed to hold the hand of a dying/freshly dead person. He grew cold and pale, but the creased strict frown lines in his face didn't fade away peacefully in death like all the books she'd read said they were supposed to.

Over the following days, she picked out a nice mahogany coffin and a black dress, took him to the undertaker's and started making all the funeral arrangements. She'd expected to cry every night and be a broken-hearted wreck, but instead she thought about how he'd stayed firmly in his office working on the night of her senior prom and there was only a quiet sort of heaviness that spoke of missed opportunities, a meteor just missing its glorious crash into planet earth.

Amelia had always told herself she'd never be like that toward her own child - singular - despite her admitted ambivalence toward children, but she didn't suppose that was a problem now.

When she asked Ash if he could make it to the funeral, he admitted, "I can't. I have a gig that day."

"Oh, the one at the Rulletta?" said Amelia.

"Yeah, that's the one," he said, brightening. "Huge opportunity. It could be my big break."

"The Rulletta closed a month ago," said Amelia flatly.

Ash paused. "Why do you always set little traps like that for me?" he asked at last, picking a fight.

Amelia sighed. "Ash, I'm going to put this in terms you can understand. I'm tired of having sex with you, and no amount of fetish is going to fix it. Don't call me again," she added, like he ever had in the first place.

"... You're upset," he said at last, "because your father's dead."

"No," said Amelia, "I'm upset because I'm dating an asshole who won't attend my father's funeral."

"Fine. You want me to attend? I'll attend," he snapped.

Amelia thought of him sitting there beside her, uncomfortable and tranquil and maybe half high, for the entire hour-long ceremony. "That's not the point," she sighed.

"Then I don't get it!" He waved his arms wide. "What is the point?!"

She turned and walked away.

"Amelia! What is the point?! So that's it?! A flat refusal and a walking away?! Is that your answer to everything?!" he called after her.

"Men," she muttered to herself, irritated that passing Metropolitans were stopping to stare at them, and she kept walking. The least he could have done, she thought, is keep their breakup to himself.

She walked around the corner into an alleyway where no one would see her and cried quietly for a few minutes. It was the first time she'd cried since... well, since a long time ago. At least since before her father's cancer diagnosis.

For some reason, at that point she thought of Martha. Martha, she thought, might want to know that her father was dead. She might hate him as much as he hated her, the beautiful and self-sacrificing and simple Martha Kent. But she might want to know.

She went back to her father's house, shuffling around through his desk, his filing cabinets and paperwork, looking for the phone number. She hadn't touched his things yet since his death, and she knew he had it; William Clark was never sentimental enough to throw away anything important.

She found Martha's phone number under the file labeled "miscellaneous", proving Amelia's point about a lack of sentimentality, even in death.

She pulled out her cell phone and dialed the unfamiliar phone number. The phone rang several times before someone answered. "Hello?" A familiar woman's voice. Amelia was surprised she'd answered an unknown phone number at all. Amelia herself certainly would have.

"Martha? It's... it's Mia." They hadn't spoken since Amelia was sixteen. "Dad's dead." There was silence on the other end of the line. "Cancer. I... I thought you'd want to know."

Amelia would have privately preferred it if the conversation had ended there, but there was a long silence before Martha spoke again. "... Oh my God," she said, sounding thunderstruck and emotional, and Amelia realized with something like dread that Martha, the one who hadn't spoken to him in over a decade, sounded much more appropriately bereaved than Amelia herself did. "I - I never - he just seemed -"

"He was pretty larger than life," Amelia supplied, uncomfortable. She was surprised to find her eyes stinging, as all she consciously felt was the kind of discomfort she always came across in emotional social interactions.

"... Yes," said Martha sadly. "When is the funeral? Where is it being held?"

Of course she would want to go. "It's... remember the old cemetery on 46th and 7th? By the bakery? We, uh... we used to joke that the cemetery was next to the bakery in case someone died of food poisoning. Well, Tony Zannia is still there selling moldy old bread, and so is the cemetery. It's at four o'clock next Wednesday," she added, but Martha was laughing, a watery sort of laugh.

"Oh, God, I missed you, Mia," she said warmly. Only Martha called Amelia "Mia." If Amelia had ever had a good enough taste in boyfriends, she might have let a guy she was dating call her Mia too, but she didn't in fact have good taste in boyfriends so that was a moot point.

"Yeah," said Amelia. "I missed you, too."

"How have you been?" Martha asked.

"Well. I was there when he died and I just broke up with my boyfriend a couple of hours ago. So, not great. I figured... now's as good a time to call as any." Amelia felt like she was once more caught in a perpetual state of sixteen-year-old awkwardness.

"Oh, Mia, I'm so sorry," said Martha sympathetically.

"Thanks. How is it over there in Smallville, Kansas?"

"... Money problems," Martha admitted. "And - well, we just recently found out I can't have kids."

"Join the club," said Amelia. "Dad's aunt had it."

There was a long silence on the other end of the line. "... I was thinking about adopting," Martha admitted tentatively. "But with money so tight and the farm in the state that it's in -"

"Dad gave me all his money," said Amelia. "You can have it. The will was just read out a few days ago. I'm sorry, I should have told you. I just didn't think."

Martha sucked in a sharp breath. "I... I can't take that," she said.

"I don't need it," said Amelia. "I have my own money. And it sounds like you need it more than me, so -" She took a deep breath. "You take it," she said.

"... How about half?" Martha compromised. "We're his two kids. We each take half."

It was nice of her - pretending Amelia had not simply been an inferior replacement for Martha. Compromising by letting Amelia keep half of the money she'd already offered to give away.

"That's fine," said Amelia. "I'll see you at the funeral. Hey, Martha?" she said right before her sister hung up. "You, uh... you should adopt that kid. Like you said you wanted to. Adoption isn't for me, but you'd make a great Mom."

She could hear the smile in Martha's voice. "Thank you," she said.

* * *

Amelia stood alone at the funeral. Martha was there, petite, long red hair with delicious volume done up in a clip, wearing a simple set of pearls and a dark gown. A big, brawny, round-shouldered farmer with tan skin, a weather-hardened face, callused hands, and hair the color of straw had his arm around her, wearing a rented tuxedo.

The priest said a lot of great things and no one volunteered any stories and then it was over. Less than twenty people had showed up.

Amelia felt it her duty to walk up to her sister after the funeral was over. Martha put her arms around her in a tight hug. "How are you holding up?" she said gently, standing back to look Amelia closely in the face. "I know you were closer to him."

Not really. "I'm holding up the same as I always do," said Amelia; it was an honest enough answer, but for some reason Martha looked almost pitying.

"Jonathan Kent," said the farmer in a deep voice, offering out his hand. "Husband."

"I remember," said Amelia, shaking it, though she hadn't remembered his first name was Jonathan. "Amelia Clark. Sister."

She gave them a polite nod. She'd done her part and was about to turn away, when - "Mia." Amelia paused. "You sounded depressed on the phone," said Martha. "We were thinking... Maybe you could spend a couple of weeks out in the country with us. Be with someone else for a while. Regain your bearings. See the farm you're helping to improve."

Amelia tried to imagine going out to a cozy little countryside cottage, but mostly she just imagined a flat, cold, windy tundra and a lot of horse shit.

"Thanks, but -" She turned back and looked into Martha's face - so innocent, so endearing. "I'd be glad to," she found herself saying helplessly, and they both looked greatly cheered. For some reason.

* * *

She watched from the truck window as the city turn slowly into countryside. Long, flat fields of golden wheat and corn. Trees - pine, sycamore, poplar, cottonwood - slowly turning hues of red, orange, and gold in the chilly October weather. Wind shook the car. You could see the sky for miles.

They passed tiny dot on the map towns you had to inch your way through, individual farmhouses way out in the middle of nowhere that Amelia imagined had to be inhabited solely by hermits who knew how to grow their own food. The roads turned to dirt and gravel; the ride became bumpy; dust clouds echoed out around them. She saw actual dust cyclones and tumbleweeds out in the distance - she'd thought those only happened in movies. They drove through one more dot on the map town - Smallville - and stopped at one of those lonely little hermit houses surrounded by fields - the Kent farm.

Amelia stepped out uncertainly, grabbing her suitcase before Jonathan could take it and looking at the little yellow and white farm house. It was surrounded by flower and vegetable gardens. There was a barn out back, a field full of cows, a grain field, a grain silo, a wind mill, and a fruit orchard.

"Small operation," she commented.

"Thanks to you, pretty soon it won't be," said Jonathan, smiling. They trekked through the dirt and up the steps to the wraparound porch. Amelia realized she was in friendly back porch, pickup truck, sweet tea country.

She probably should have worn better shoes. Heels didn't really cut it out here, she didn't imagine.

She was led up the hickory stairs to the guest room and set her things down on the big oak bed with blue sheets, staring around herself at the checkered curtains and rustic decor. There weren't any animal heads or skins lying anywhere. She'd almost expected there to be.

"Mia, what have you gotten yourself into?" she whispered.

* * *

Over the next few days, the Kents tried include her in daily life. They took her horseback riding (which started in a very smelly barn) laughing when she climbed into the saddle and found herself facing the horse's butt.

"Everybody does it once," Jonathan chuckled. "Left foot in the left stirrup."

She thought she'd done pretty good swinging her leg all the way over on the first try. Apparently not.

Horseback riding was even more alarming once the horse started moving. She kept yanking on the reins so that the horse was standing still again. She liked it when the horse stood still. But Martha or Jonathan always trotted back to her and said, "Tap with your heels again. And don't yank so hard."

They climbed up a treacherous path in the woods. Amelia decided she did not like steep hills, or low hanging branches, and she especially did not like the idea that her horse might slip and fall down the bank. She imagined dying from a horse falling onto her and decided she might not be able to stand the humiliation.

Other activities were more fun. She and Martha cooked and baked a lot together, even though the Kents insisted guests shouldn't be cooking savory breakfasts for themselves. "I like cooking," said Amelia simply. Eggs, toast, and tea fit right in with her morning routine.

The porch swing was fun, though as she'd guessed the cold wind was not. She and Martha watched Jonathan carve pumpkins. Occasionally Jonathan went out for the day and brought home a catch of fish. They went into town one day and took Amelia antiques shopping. She bought a cute little handwritten book of local law from 1911 and a couple of useless tourist knick knacks. Everyone knew the Kents. People smiled and said hi as they passed. They took her by the historical cases in the town hall, and by the water tower.

It was peaceful in Smallville, Kansas. Very quiet. No noise. Stars clear in the sky.

On the fifth night, she told Martha, as they sat with herbal tea on the porch swing in sweaters, "I get it. Why you moved out here." She was still watching the sky.

Martha smiled over at her. "Think you'll stay?" she asked.

"... I can't imagine myself staying anywhere," Amelia admitted. "Not even in Metropolis. It's why I changed careers. Eventually, I don't know... I just get bored."

Martha nodded, taking this in. "Well, you're not attached to anyone yet," she said. "I used to think that about myself, too. But with a partner or a kid, it becomes different. Where they are just... starts to feel like home."

Amelia snorted. "Martha, get real. I see no partner or kid on my horizon."

"You could adopt too. I think you'd make a great Mom."

"Bullshit."

"You'd be better than you think you would be," said Martha quietly. "Trust me."

Amelia rarely trusted anyone, but she decided not to relay this to the ever-touchy-feely Martha Kent.

"I'd be a single Mom," she pointed out instead.

"There are worse things," said Martha, "if you really wanted one. And we could help you. Jonathan and I have already decided we want to adopt a son."

"Congratulations," said Amelia, feeling tired.

Martha looked at her for a while. "Maybe having a kid would open you up," she said softly, almost to herself. "Maybe the right kid could do that. I always feel like there are parts of you that I can't reach."

Amelia snorted and smiled a little, sitting forward so that they were eye to eye. "Funny. I feel the same way about myself," she said. "Tragic lives are supposed to turn out like yours did, Martha. They rarely do."

Martha was silent as Amelia stood up and went back inside the farm house.

* * *

A couple of days later, when it was all mostly forgotten, the Kents announced they were going into town. They invited her, but it seemed more like a date afternoon and so Amelia denied their invitation.

"I thought I'd try out my rusty piano skills on that old antique piano in the living room, while no one's around to hear me," she joked.

"We expect a full concert when we get back," said Jonathan, amused.

"Be careful what you wish for. I haven't played since I was eleven," said Amelia dryly, and the Kents laughed. They left in their truck - first stop was the flower shop - and Amelia sat on the dormer window in the sunlight and read, curled up and satisfied like a cat. There was something about Smallville, she thought - it opened people up.

A huge crash and a flash of light, a boom that shook the wooden floorboards, made her look up. There were smoke trails in the sky. A huge mushroom cloud of dirt echoed out from a nearby field.

"... Meteor shower," she whispered in realization, eyes wide. Then another flash of light impacted in another field with a boom, and she shrieked and threw the book down, running outside and straight into the darkened storm cellar. She was afraid of spiders and rats, but decided she was more afraid of meteor strikes. She slammed the doors shut and crouched there in the darkness in fear, listening to distant, thunderous booms.

She thought about Martha and Jonathan. Wondered if they were dead.

Eventually, a silence fell. She slowly, tentatively, opened the wood doors and peeked her head out.

Dust hung in the silent, ringing air over Smallville, Kansas. Whole sections of field had been leveled. Smoke still hung in the sky, but nothing streaked there anymore - the shower was over.

She wandered out into the back yard, dazed, and was amazed to find the barn and the farm house still standing. Then there was a rumble - a truck - against all odds, the Kents were in the truck. It was unfamiliar, but they were in it.

She sprinted out to meet them, not even afraid of getting run over. They screeched to a halt, and Martha and Amelia ran out to meet each other, Martha jumping out of the truck. "Oh, thank God you're alive." Amelia hugged Martha tightly, gasping, babbling. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry for every bad thing I've ever said to you. I'm sorry for every bad thing I've ever said about Jonathan. I'm sorry -"

There was a third person she was about to say sorry to, and then she realized Martha had not had a toddler boy in her arms when she'd left that morning. Amelia backed up, staring.

"Who the hell are you? Adoption processes work faster than I remember," were the first words out of her mouth.

Martha laughed and Amelia realized, frowning, that she seemed oddly... glowy. "You won't believe what we found in one of the fields," said Jonathan, and instead of pulling away the tarp in the back of the truck to reveal something appropriate, like a ruined piece of farm equipment, he pulled the tarp off of a spaceship. A tiny, child-sized spaceship.

"That... is so not the appropriate response to this piece of information," Amelia gasped out. "We - oh my God, we have to inform the authorities, we have to - wait." She looked between them. Both seemed sheepish and uncomfortable.

"You're going to adopt an ALIEN?!" she shrieked.

The little, seemingly human dark-haired boy in her sister's arms beamed.

* * *

"If we hand him over to the government, he'll just be experimented on in some science lab for the rest of his life, controlled to do their bidding. He might even be killed," said Martha intently.

"... But he's an alien," said Amelia. She supposed she was in a state of shock. She'd sitting at their kitchen table, saying nothing else for the past five minutes.

Martha sighed, exasperated. "Yes, Mia," she said at last. "He's an alien."

"Well I feel that's kind of an important point!" Amelia was suddenly freaking out. "Yes, he's a very cute, young alien, but we have no idea what he's capable of, or why he was sent here!"

"He's just a child!" said Martha heatedly.

"He looks like a child," said Amelia, pained. "He's not human and he can't speak English; who knows how old he is?!"

"I brought up the important point that we have no idea how we're going to pass him off as our child," said Jonathan flatly from the corner. He was standing with his arms folded. He'd already hidden the spaceship underneath the tarp in the storm cellar.

"But Amelia, just look at him," said Martha. "You can't look into his face and tell me he's dangerous."

Amelia swallowed - stood and walked over, kneeled down and looked into the little dark haired boy's face. He had very pale skin, very blue eyes. He was wearing an old, holey, over-large T shirt, playing with some of Jonathan Kent's old toys - firemen, trucks, that kind of thing. He'd seemed more interested in Martha's old stuffed animals, but the Kents were big on gender roles and Amelia had decided not to mention it. There were more important fights at hand.

"I see a very cute, human-looking kid," said Amelia helplessly at last. "I don't know, Martha, I don't see what you see. You know I've never had your way with kids -"

The little boy smiled and offered her a toy.

Martha smiled triumphantly into the silence. "He hasn't offered anything to me," she said.

Uncertainly, Amelia took the toy. She did not feel immediately bonded with the child, the way Martha seemed to, but she decided to give it a shot. Learn more about him. "What do you want to do with this?" She held it up for his appraisal.

"Mia, he can't understand -" Jonathan began, exasperated, but then the boy took the toy and began making little noises and motioning, creating a big bridge out of all the toys, stacking them on top of one another. Mia started building the bridge with him.

"He understands just fine," she said. "And don't call me Mia."

Jonathan had fallen silent in surprise.

At last, Amelia looked up, determined. "He needs building blocks," she said. "Or have you got any Lincoln logs?"

She sat with the kid playing with him for about an hour, and within that hour she figured out that he was a toddler. A very smart toddler, but a toddler, with no previous speaking experience. She didn't suppose he'd get much, in a spaceship. He was very quiet and intent on his building. He'd probably be good for taking things apart and putting them back together, she guessed. A little bonding time with stuffed animals wouldn't hurt either.

"You're right," she said cautiously at last. "He's just a kid. And... his life probably would be shit if we handed him over to the authorities," she admitted. "But that still leaves the problem of how to pass him off as your son."

"He seems to like you," said Martha, standing. "So while we go volunteer at the hospital in town - it's very over crowded right now - why don't you stay with him?" She nodded to the boy.

"Okay," said Amelia uncertainly. It was only for a few hours. How hard could that be?

* * *

While she was playing with the boy, there was a knock on the door. She opened it up, and nearly shrieked. Nearly. The sheriff was standing on the other side.

"I'm looking for the Kents," he said, frowning, all mustached and droopy-eyed. "I saw their truck crashed and I wanted to see if they were alright."

"I'm - uh - I'm Martha's half sister," said Amelia. "I'm here visiting. They're fine. They're out volunteering in town. And I'm just, um - holding down the home front." That was how people talked here, right? She laughed nervously.

Then the little boy came up, wrapping his arms around her leg, frowning up distrustfully at the stranger. He didn't seem to like the sheriff in the same way he'd liked Amelia.

"Your son?" said the sheriff, and he surprised her so much that she said, "No."

He stared at her. "... I didn't know the Kents were thinking of adopting," he said at last.

"They haven't - they - um -" Amelia had always been a terrible liar. "The agency has let them keep the kid with them a few days. See if they all gel as a family."

The sheriff nodded. "I didn't know they did that. What's his name?"

"We... haven't decided on that yet." She gave her best smile.

"Hm." The sheriff stared at her suspiciously. "Well, let me know if you folks need anything..." he said slowly, and sloped back to his car.

Amelia bit her lip. Damnit.

* * *

The Kents were frantic when they found out.

"He can't stay here if the law is suspicious of him," said Jonathan firmly. "He has to leave, and he has to go with you, Amelia." He gave her a hard look.

"With me?! But - but you guys wanted to adopt him!" Amelia was almost frantic.

Martha looked pained, but she admitted, "It's what's best for him. What else are we supposed to do? Look, you can name him yourself, we'll find a way to forge adoption papers and send them on to you."

"I - I'm not prepared for this, I can't raise a kid, I can't raise an alien, I can't -!" Amelia was frantic. "Martha, I can't do this," she said with feel.

Martha put a hand on her shoulder. "Yes, you can." She looked into her sister's eyes, and Amelia saw a confidence there that she herself failed to match. "He likes you. I can tell. Everything will be just fine."

What else was Amelia supposed to do? She took the kid and sat him in her lap in the truck that night, a grim Jonathan sitting beside her to drive her back to her house in Metropolis City. "Martha," said Amelia, pausing, as Martha helped her into the car, "... use the money I gave you to expand your farm. You still get half, as promised. And you should adopt a human son."

Martha smiled at her, her lip trembling, and she nodded. Then, wordlessly, she slammed the door shut.

Jonathan drove Amelia silently, his face dark, to the city and dropped her off with the boy at her Metropolis City townhouse that night. Adoption papers with the name Amelia had chosen from a fictional Metropolis charity came a few days later. They gave the boy's surname as "Clark" - Amelia's surname. It made the thing all too real. The boy's age was given as three years old.

Amelia never asked how the adoption papers had been made.

* * *

She stood in front of the little dark-haired alien boy in her house on that first morning, hands on her hips, and looked down at him.

"Well," she said, "and what to do with you. Breakfast, I suppose?"

She held up a muffin and the boy perked up. They'd already confirmed he could eat solid foods.

The first thing she did was pick a name and a birthday. A metallic tablet filled with strange, vertical geometric writing had come with the boy, and she still had it with her. A linguistics expert, she had noticed the language looked a lot like Sanskrit, the first found human language, which together with the boy's human appearance had a lot of terrifying implications.

But she rented a book of Sanskrit and slowly translated the metallic tablet.

Hello. We are Lara and Jor of the House of El. If you are reading this, our planet has been destroyed. Please look after our son. His name is Kal. He was born February 29th. Please treat him as your own.

So he was a refugee. She relaxed a little. That explained the rain of meteor fragments that had come along with him. His name was Kal of the House of El, and he was a refugee. He really was a child.

No one else bothered to study Sanskrit, but just in case, she hid the tablet and never discarded it.

She picked his birthday as February 28th, the only way it could be celebrated every year. Then came picking a name. It had to be perfect. She went through hundreds of baby name books. In the end she chose Rhys. Rhys Clark.

She spent her days buying the boy clothes, builder's toys and stuffed animals, and trying to teach him English and what different things in the house did. She read books to him and introduced him to music, fed him healthy food and limited TV time and taught him meditation. He learned fast, took apart all her technology and put it back together expertly, and otherwise his manners were already perfect. He could walk, run, he was potty trained and everything. She didn't know how thorough that spaceship's education had been, but considering "House of El" sounded like nobility, she had her suspicions.

He was a quiet boy, capable of enormous concentration on a single task. He never had tantrums, perhaps an alien trait; on the contrary, his emotions seemed almost super controlled. He was sweet, he clung to both people and stuffed toys, and he liked drawing.

Her friends were all stunned to find she'd adopted a little boy.

"It's a little rash after a death in the family and a breakup," said Amy, frowning. "Are you sure you aren't just trying to make up for something?"

"... I think I'm reaching for something I never had," Amelia corrected her, watching Rhys make a mess of his toys and appliances on the living room rug. "And besides, he's no trouble." She realized, as she said it, that she'd started to believe she could do this - raise a secretly alien son named Rhys Clark.

She took him to the park often, and she started noticing strange men following her from a distance. Newspapers, shaded glasses. Plain clothes policemen. Had Smallville and Metropolis been in contact with one another?

Deciding she could afford to live off of her earnings and her father's money, she bent down to the little boy one day and said, "Rhys? Pack your stuff. We're going to take an airplane and do a little globe trotting. First stop: Iceland. Then maybe Portugal, Greece, Tokyo, and France. Does that sound good?"

He beamed at her, and she smiled and ruffled his hair.

"Of course it does. Now let's get your passport. And I have to get certified to do home schooling."

It all happened within a whirlwind few-month period. She left her old life behind and never looked back. Rhys became that part of her life she'd never known she'd needed - the part called "meaning."

* * *

 _Author's Notes:_ Rhys will go to Smallville for the beginning of canon, but I plan on having many chapters before that showing what his childhood and early teenage years were like. At the beginning of canon, he will be a new student.


	2. Chapter 2

2.

Rhys was terrified of heights, it turned out. He clung to the seat hard, stiff, staring straight ahead of himself, looking like he was about to poop for the entire plane ride over. If that was how people on his planet dealt with fear, well, Amelia supposed it could be worse.

Curious, she brought a stuffed toy in front of his face, one of his favorites. He stared at it robotically, uncomprehending.

It was as she'd thought. He dealt with negative feelings by shutting down all the parts of himself that were emotional.

They landed in Reykjavik, Iceland and got a rented car at the airport with their belongings. Rhys was finally starting to unfreeze and look around himself curiously; she held tight to his hand to keep him from wandering off.

She held up a book of Icelandic and started asking the clerk in broken words for a Rent-A-Car. He gazed at her humorously for a few minutes, then finally said with an accent, "I speak English." She blushed, very embarrassed, lowering the book. "Most of us do," he said cheerfully. "Now, what kind of car did you say you needed?"

They drove through the coastal city, which was awe-inspiring - hundreds of huge, old-fashioned white buildings with colorful roofs. They drove by the pier and the coast, with its cold iron-grey water and its black pebble beach. Iceland was like nothing either of them had ever seen. Rhys stared out the window, fascinated.

They got to their new house, setting their things down inside and letting out a great breath. "Well, Rhys," said Amelia, "welcome to your new home."

Rhys trotted off to go explore the rest of the house. He was a little adventurer. Amelia had been trying to channel some of his childish enthusiasm. She'd always felt better, anyway, cutting ties - being in a new place.

Over the next few days, they learned more about Iceland. Most of the small population lived in Reykjavik, the rest in small rural villages farther out into the country. Housing and food were insanely expensive by American standards, utilities insanely cheap because even summers were cool and during winters geothermal heating was used instead of what was standard in the United States. Locking your door in the evening was a necessity, because the nightlife in Reykjavik could get loud and wild, to say the least. Icelanders worked hard in sub-Arctic conditions all day and then got drunk on vodka at night - that seemed to be the general life motto.

Amelia took them out in a car exploring the nature and surrounding landscape around the city. It was frigid, but beautiful - vast landscapes of nature and mountains unspoiled even by trees. Like in Kansas, the sky was clear for miles, but the scenery - nothing could compete with it. It was amazing. Streams, rivers, waterfalls, mountains, glaciers and grass abounded. Everything was amazingly clean; there weren't many mammals, not even many bugs. Most of them couldn't survive the harsh weather conditions.

Oh, and the weather - it was a thing in and of itself. Chilly and steel-grey, with plentiful rainfall and long, cold, dark winters. Summers were short with unnaturally long days, only a few hours of darkness falling each day during those months.

Raising a child and not having a job, Amelia didn't experience much of the infamous Reykjavik nightlife, but she did try to make friends with her surrounding neighbors. She wasn't successful at first - everyone seemed very gruff and stoic and no one seemed interested in talking to her. But then one day a man started hanging around her door, knocking on it and yelling harassment, somewhat out of his mind - and all of her neighbors, women included, had come shouting out of their houses and chased him away with metal poles.

"You are one of us," her next door neighbor, an old lady, said firmly. "No one bothers my friend."

So maybe friendship was just expressed differently in Iceland than in the United States.

Rhys was lucky to learn the complex Icelandic language so early in life. Languages seemed to come naturally to him - she wasn't sure if that was an alien thing or because of his youth. But either way, he learned English from her and the Icelandic language from the surrounding populace. He became effortlessly bilingual from very early on in life. Amelia encouraged this. If she had her way, her son would have mastered several languages by the time he was a teenager.

He seemed to adapt effortlessly to the subarctic weather, which seemed at odds with his stiff clumsiness in most graceful pursuits. He was like an Icelander - quiet and stoical, but intelligent and at home in harsh, frigid conditions. Set against ice, his colors came out brilliantly, and he could run around in Iceland in the winter in a T shirt with no harm done to himself. He gave off so much heat and yet seemed to keep an infinite supply of more inside his body.

It almost made her wonder if he'd been born to adapt to a planet colder than Earth.

Amelia learned a lot about human interaction through raising Rhys, ironically. She learned to become more comfortable and gentler showing she cared for another human being. She was never showy and warm and affectionate like Martha, but she nagged Rhys and scolded him in gentle exasperation, made sure he was always holding her hand and wearing a jacket. They taught each other language, and from a very early age, he called her "Mom." She learned to be compassionate and care for someone else besides herself. Martha had been right, to her eternal surprise. She never got tired of Rhys or ambivalent toward him, as she'd feared she would. Home became where Rhys was.

She never lost her inspiration to wander, but now she wandered with somebody else, and found unexpectedly that she was much happier for it.

Her love for Rhys was tested quickly. At about age four or five, his powers started manifesting themselves: unnatural speed and strength. Rhys could break tables and lift beds, he could run so fast her eyes couldn't track him - fast like a bullet. And the older he grew, the more extreme his powers got.

She had to keep him inside and away from other children, telling people he was sickly. They would hole up in the house together, and she would help him learn to control his abilities, telling him they needed to "hide." They moved from smaller steps to bigger steps - going so fast she could track him, holding something metal without crushing it. Then going at even slower speeds, holding things like apples and pencils.

Rhys was also home schooled, doubling his isolation away from other people his age. She quickly discovered Rhys to be a genius, and gave him increasingly difficult schoolwork in an effort to continually intellectually challenge him. At the same time, she noticed something else - he was much better with logic than he was with emotional understanding. He tried hard, awkwardly, to be emotionally human, but his incomprehension of human feelings showed sometimes. He was cripplingly blunt, and he did not always seem to understand why she was upset with him.

In retaliation against his isolation and early intellectual genius, and his mother's understanding and acceptance of his more alien roots, Rhys became a very quiet boy. He discovered an early interest in all things mechanical and virtual, from coding to engineering, and he became a major bookworm and video game player. He had a very active imagination, she noticed, in everything from his toys to his drawings and models to his books.

* * *

As Rhys got older and his control got better, he began exploring Reykjavik. He learned from an early age to travel and find his way on his own. His mother, independent herself, encouraged this once he learned not to be stupid enough to wander into a bad part of town or step out in front of a moving car. She was strict about certain things - regular meditation, healthy food, limited TV time. But she let him explore and be his own person, and he could live with that compromise quite well.

He had more affection and protective instincts for his mother than for any other living being. He thought she was perfect, with her pale heart shaped face, coal black eyes, and brutally short black hair, with the worry lines around her mouth and eyes. He didn't always understand other people when they talked about "love" but he thought that was what he felt for his mother.

In his explorations, he learned to avoid Reykjavik nightlife like a pro. Once when he was young, his mother had taken him to a neighbor's party and he kept sneaking vodka because he was curious and he wanted to try it for himself. The room got very spinny and he didn't remember much, but he did remember his mother yanking him out of the room and back to their house, he did remember throwing up on her shoes, and he distinctly remembered his mother scolding him, telling him he'd tried to show off to the other kids and almost revealed his abilities.

He avoided alcohol like the plague after that, and became an expert at dodging around drunks and parties at night.

Other kids made fun of him, throwing stones at his bicycle wheels and shouting profanities at him. He just stood there and watched them until they went away. Rhys didn't mind. He was okay with being by himself. His neighbors, all very loyal to him and his mother, would sometimes come running out and shout the kids away.

"Why don't you fight back?" the old woman next door would always ask.

Rhys didn't know how to tell her that if he fought back, he would kill them, and anyway he wasn't the blindly fighting back type. Strategy, he was good at - like in his games. But angry, brute violence was not his way, not even when provoked. He saw other people distant to him sometimes use it, and it never seemed to get them quite what they wanted, so he deleted that part of himself out of his life.

His mother was the one to point out that he could compartmentalize his mind better than most people, but she did not say that like it was a good thing.

He did anything he could do that was active which didn't involve his powers - biking, skateboarding, rollerblading, swimming, hiking. He loved Reykjavik winters and weathers; he found glaciers beautiful and fascinating and he loved hiking around the clean, serene landscape with his Mom; most of Iceland was almost its own national park. He formed a love for chilly grey days, for the ocean on Reykjavik's shores, and also for warm mugs of tea on cold days.

He did form a fascination with the ocean - for visiting aquariums and tide pools and studying aquatic creatures, collecting black pebbles and seashells at the beach. He also formed an interest in space and astronomy, and insisted he and his mother hike out into the wilderness with mugs of hot cocoa and lawn chairs for every single meteor shower. Since he couldn't study space physically, he studied it in pictures and through telescopes.

Rhys formed a ritual. Every evening, once a week, he would bike down to the pier and sit next to an old Icelandic man, and they would talk together about - anything and everything, but big topics. Literature, philosophy, psychology, politics. Rhys never learned the man's name, and the old man never learned his, but he taught Rhys a lot about life. He told him about love, tolerance, and compassion for all peoples and all types of love, and about respect and compassion for nature - Iceland was a very liberal place, Rhys was only later to learn; for now that was just how the world was. The old man also recommended books that were way out of Rhys's age level and never once gave nod to the idea that Rhys couldn't understand them, a thing Rhys appreciated.

"It is important that we keep cultured and educated," said the old man. "We can gain something even from books we don't totally understand." And he would actually scold Rhys if he fell back on his assigned literary or abstract reading. Others might have minded such strictness, but Rhys respected it. He didn't mind at all. The old man always said just what he thought, and so did Rhys. They had a lot of lovely, frank discussions about the world.

Rhys didn't fully appreciate them at the time. He was to learn later on in his life that most people were not always so thoughtful or so open.


	3. Chapter 3

3.

"You always understood that we were going to leave someday," Rhys's mother sighed. She had started to become tired and faded, as if staying in one place was slowly sucking the life out of her. "I'm sorry, Rhys. I need somewhere new."

He cut off the part of his brain that was emotional. "... My home is here," he said stonily, robotic.

He and his Mom looked at each other. It wasn't really a fight - they didn't believe in dramatic fights - but resentment festered underneath the surface.

"Will you not come with me, then?" said his mother, and Rhys couldn't tell if she sounded sad, rhetorical, or sarcastic. He was not adept at picking out such nuances.

"You are my mother and I want you to be happy," said Rhys coldly. "Of course, I will go. That was never the point."

He turned around and left, slamming the front door shut a little harder than was necessary and grabbing his bike. He needed some air.

Amelia looked after him and thought that fighting with Rhys was actually worse than fighting with a human. What was to be done, she thought, with a person who wouldn't yell their feelings at you? What was to be done with a person who simply looked?

* * *

Rhys found the old man sitting at the usual bench overlooking the ocean. He settled down beside him. They were silent for a while. Normal humans could always tell when someone else was upset, an art Rhys had never mastered.

"We are moving," he said at last, in rough Icelandic. "My mother wants us to move to Portugal. I know nothing about Portugal."

"So are you never going to try anywhere else because you don't know anything about it?" said the old man gruffly. "Perhaps you will like Portugal. It could be a place to reinvent yourself."

"Iceland is my home."

"Sentimentality doesn't suit you. What is the real problem?"

Rhys sighed, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, unknowingly copying his mother. "My mother will always want to move somewhere else, and she has the money to do it. I just... keep picturing a life of always moving somewhere else."

The old man paused. "Only until you are eighteen," he said.

Rhys's eyes creased in pain. "I cannot leave my mother. She needs me."

"Ah. Then you will always be alone," said the old man simply.

"I'm fine with being alone," said Rhys, an unfamiliar, hot emotion riding inside his chest. He felt a little bit like he felt when the other kids threw rocks at the spokes on his bicycle wheels. He watched the ocean move about.

"You're fine with it now," the old man predicted.

"What are you trying to say?" Rhys turned around at last to look his mentor fully in the face.

"That you are a child with a full life ahead of you, and you should openly go where life takes you," said the old man. "But you do not have to follow your mother around for your entire life. Does your mother follow hers?"

"... No," said Rhys.

"Then do not despair. As an adult, you can do what you want. It is not forever," said the old man. "Now. Before you leave Iceland for good, how would you like to go sailing?"

So Rhys went out on the boat with the Icelandic man who had been the only friend he had. He held onto a rope unsteadily, life jacket on, the sea wind whipping his face. And the old man taught him basic sailing techniques, how to stay steady on an uneven surface, what fish to look for, what to do if you fell over into the cold water below.

Rhys looked out over the building-lined coast and said goodbye to Reykjavik.

* * *

They moved to a village in the warm, dry Algarve area, near the sea, a move based in Amelia trying to appease Rhys. It was a single-story villa, small garden. Rhys had to get used to everything from the landscape, to the food, to the weather, to the small vegetable garden his mother grew. His mother became vibrant again, their brilliantly colored surroundings giving her new life.

The nearby beach was white and sandy, the entire lagoon filled with pine trees set atop soft red and yellow sandstone cliffs. Rhys made friends at the daily fish market in the village, bartering and haggling and chatting with fishermen's wives, and also with children at the lagoon. They didn't go to school together, but accepted him as a distant friend after he took up their challenge, walked up nauseously and dizzily to edge of the cliff, and had the guts to jump in anyway.

The seawater was a deep blue-green and incredibly warm, the sun sparkling onto it. He would walk out onto the beach in nothing but shorts, somehow never getting a sunburn, and splash around in the water with the other children.

This, of course, required Rhys learning Spanish and Portuguese. His mother said these languages came as easily to him as the Icelandic language had, and Icelandic never faded from his vocabulary from disuse. His photographic memory did help, but he and his mother were starting to suspect ease with languages was another of his intellectual gifts. He was in the unusual position of helping his mother learn language, teaching her using English, becoming a soothing mentor figure when she felt overwhelmed by all the changes.

Rhys learned that he could adapt anywhere, and was much happier for it.

The hot summers were worlds apart from Iceland, and even the wet Mediterranean winters carried warm tropical storms, not cold subarctic ones. The wind, at least, was familiar, though unforgivably hot.

Rhys became comfortable walking around in little clothing and his mother sometimes had to scold him to put more on. The warm weather made him lazy, and he spent many an afternoon curled up in the sunshine in shorts with a book.

While Iceland had mainly sported heavy Viking era meals - lamb, potatoes, fish, seafood - Portugal was good for pastries, espresso, yogurt, soups, cheeses, rice puddings, custards, and tarts, though seafood was still a constant. And wine was much more plentiful than vodka. He formed a taste for good espresso while in Portugal.

He continued his increasingly advanced home schooling, but his mother also took him on a tour through various pieces of ancient art and old architecture around Portugal, teaching him art history and meaning. She drove him to the ballet and the theater in nearby major cities, and introduced him to poetry and story writing. That her son be creative and expressive was very important to Amelia.

Once, after visiting an old Church and looking up at the angels painted onto the domed ceiling, he said into the echoing silence, "I wonder if I'm an angel. Like them, I have special powers."

"Well, you did come from the sky," said his mother unexpectedly, and he looked down.

"Mother," he said at last, frowning, "how did you find me? Why can I do what I do? And why do I need to hide?"

She sighed, looking sorrowful. She took him home, and told him quietly the whole story of his alien origins, of how she had found him. In the end, as he was sitting there stunned, she pressed the metallic tablet from his biological parents into his hands.

"This is the tablet I translated," she said. "It's the only words you have from your world. Would you like me to explain them to you?"

She took him through what each character signified, and he sat there many an afternoon running his fingers along the grooved hieroglyphs for countless hours afterward, until he'd memorized every nuance of his parents' last message to him. Kal-El, they had named him. His name was Kal. He was alien nobility.

He was not an angel, but he felt just as strange - just as different. He understood, for the first time, why he was fascinated by the stars. It was because he came from them.


	4. Chapter 4

4.

Moving from place to place for so many years, Rhys learned the important lesson that every military brat learns: it never stops being hard saying goodbye and learning to thrive in a new place. Not even if you like visiting new places.

Still, Greece was a good place. He was a preteen by the time he moved there, and he quickly picked up on the Greek language. Greece had its benefits - it was safe and cheap, the weather was mild, and the people there were very warm, welcoming, and friendly. Rhys had to learn to feel more comfortable with warm, hearty people, mothering people who insisted he eat more and invited him and his mother over for parties and laughed a lot. He formed a sheepish kind of politeness. They had moved to a coastal Greek village built on a mountain, close to both the coast and several ponds.

The Greek landscape was beautiful. Mountainous and bare, with lots of heavy greenery; like in Iceland, there was very little forestry and you could see the sky for miles. Unlike in Iceland or Portugal, there was very little bad weather or wind. The food was familiar from Portugal, very Mediterranean - vegetables, olive oil, grain fish, wine, meat, olives, cheese, eggplant zucchini, lemon juice, vegetables, herbs, bread, and yogurt.

Fascinated, Rhys took to studying the macabre and the occult, interested in ancient Greek belief systems and culture. Magic and darkness became two of his special studies of interest, particularly as they related to ancient women and goddesses. He went on tours of ancient ruins with his mother and sometimes even explored them on his own, studying history and beliefs in dark magic and other worlds.

It was around this time that Rhys gained his first crush. She was the next door neighbor, the daughter of a large, cheerful mother who was very friendly to him and his own mother. She was small and slim, with long wavy black hair and big black eyes and olive skin. She was whimsical, different, and at ease with herself. He liked that about her, but was too shy to say anything. He would watch her from a distance, then blush and look back down at his books when he caught her eye.

One day, she walked over to him and looked steadily into his eye. He glanced up hesitantly from his book. "What are you reading?" she asked with a secret smile, like she could see right through him.

"I'm studying the religious practices of ancient Greek priestesses -" he began matter of factly, and then stopped awkwardly when she seemed amused. He didn't suppose most people admitted to that.

"You're a nerd," said the girl, smiling. "But I like you." Her name was Callista, and she collected butterflies and pressed flowers and believed in the power of crystals which she hung in her room. They took to talking together underneath the tree beside his house, sharing their individual strange enthusiasms with one another.

One day he was in the middle of explaining to her a long, complex piece of coding, and she leaned over and kissed him. He stared at her in surprise - then, bucking up his courage, he leaned over and kissed her back. She gave him a secret smile, and he flushed and gave a rare one himself, wide, too big for his face. He looked in that moment every bit the preteen boy, and she enjoyed that about him. He felt a large balloon of happiness swelling inside him.

He was overly tall, very awkward, and extremely shy, with too-big blue eyes and a messy mop of black hair, but Callista didn't seem to mind.

"Meet me at the pond by the lane, nine o'clock tonight," she whispered.

* * *

He snuck out the window of his bedroom that night when he was supposed to be studying after dinner. He climbed down the viney trellis fronting his and his mother's cottage, and whispered off through the grass in his sneakers. He was nervous, his stomach jumping. He met her at the pond in the moonlight, and Callista smiled triumphantly. "You came," she said.

"Of course," he said cautiously. "So what is -"

He halted. She was slowly taking off her clothes.

"Uh - what, what are you doing?" He swallowed, wincing; his voice had just cracked a little.

"Going swimming, what does it look like?" said Callista, with a small, whimsical smile. "Want to join me?"

He was clumsy taking off his clothes from nerves, his hands shaking. At last, they stood naked in front of each other, and he reached out and delicately touched the curve of her breast, then her face. She was such a tiny, delicate little thing, stunning in the moonlight. His eyes were wide; he wanted his photographic memory to capture every aspect of this moment; his gaze was locked on her.

"You're beautiful," he whispered.

Callista smiled and stepped closer to him. "My father left when I was very young," she said unexpectedly. "I don't believe in relationships. I just - I just wanted to have this moment. Is that okay?"

"... Yeah," he whispered. "That's okay. I - I've never - I've never before -" He was embarrassed to admit it.

Callista put a finger to his lips. "That's okay," she smiled, returning the favor.

They kissed and it was bittersweet and he didn't know how he was capable of feeling this much at once.

They sunk into the moonlit pond, their bodies writhing against each other, mouths and bodies meeting. They didn't have sex, because it wasn't about the sex - it was about two strange people who didn't have many friends, meeting together in warmth and intimacy. They were clumsy at first, but grew more confident, used to the feel of each other. He sat there holding her in the moonlight for a while, softly caressing her skin.

"You didn't have sex with me," she said.

"Are you disappointed?" he asked, frowning.

"No." She smiled. "I just can't believe I've found a preteen boy who cares about tenderness more than sex." She tucked her chin into the curve of his shoulder, his collarbone.

"... I would never take advantage of you, Callista," he said softly.

They spent a summer together. Their mothers gave them secret smiles, watching them hold hands, but Rhys was pretty sure they never found out just how far the physical intimacy had gone. He wrote her many poems - better with writing than with speaking - and realized at some point that he was in love with her. The wonderful thing about Callista was that she didn't seem to mind that he didn't understand emotion and couldn't dance and got scared easily. She would help him effortlessly, compassionately, through it.

He knew he wanted more. He also knew she didn't, so he never asked. He'd already given his assent that a casual relationship was okay. Rhys kept his word.

When the summer ended, they went back to being distant friends. They stopped having secret meetings at the pond or under the tree, but they still lived near each other, would smile and talk to each other in passing. It hurt a lot, but unbeknownst to Rhys, to give her credit, Callista never bragged to the other girls about getting Rhys Clark to up her poor social status.

Many of the girls romanticized Rhys a lot more than he consciously believed.


	5. Chapter 5

5.

Greece had been a kind of fever dream, but Tokyo was a different place altogether.

It was very large and very crowded. He and his mother rented a tiny flat and could hear the people on all sides of them very clearly. The food was unlike anything he had ever tried, Love Hotels were amazing, the Harajuku district was incredible, and some of the things that came out of vending machines defied explanation. Rhys learned to explore a brand-new city, trying everything from pig testicles at Piss Alley to cat cafes and themed cafes to sumo wrestling stables.

Tokyo was all bright neon lights and hundreds of people crowding the sidewalks and lots of noise. At the same time, it was also unusually clean. Idol groups and pop stars in bizarre face paint abandoned, and the "kawaii" trend was another thing entirely.

Growing more into his teenage years, Rhys became more interested in technology and social media, and also in music. He tried everything from rock to hip hop, and mastered the Japanese language so that he could listen to music in the country he was living in and understand it.

He did get interested in certain things in Japan - comics and manga, foreign films, and the neo noir genre. In layman's terms, he just became more of a nerd.

In an effort to meet people, he joined clubs and groups, and found a group of fellow teenagers to enjoy Tokyo city nightlife with. Tokyo nightlife ended unusually early, around midnight to catch the last train, and some people just stayed up all night. Drunks would regularly pass out in the streets and lie there all night, and there was an unspoken rule that nobody was ever to touch them.

In many ways, Tokyo was not only unusually clean, but unusually moral.

Rhys kept up his policy of not drinking, so he became the person designated to take funny pictures and get all the drunks home safely. Rhys found he liked candid and artistic photos; he studied capturing the right angle of all his friends' adventures (or misadventures) in the neon lights of clubs.

He soon began to have complex feelings for one of the people in his hangout group - not a woman, but a man. Or, well, a boy, a teenager around his age. He was dark and quiet and cerebral, and very pretty, and Rhys didn't think there was anything wrong with feeling that way until he started waking up from dreams about the boy, Aki, feeling very aroused.

The weird thing was, Aki had started behaving aggressively toward Rhys, trying to pick fights. Rhys would stare at him, puzzled, not even going for it. One night at a club they weren't supposed to be at, Aki cornered Rhys by the bathrooms and got all up in his face, shouting and shouting things. Then, roughly, Aki kissed him. And it was incredible. Rhys fisted his hands in Aki's hair, and they made out hard and rough, and Rhys came to the distant realization in part of his mind even then that totally straight people didn't do this.

Rhys came home to his Mom that night and said quietly, "I think I'm bisexual."

She stared at him for a long time. "Are you sure?" she asked at last. Somehow ashamed, he nodded. "Well, that's fine," she said, and something inside him relaxed. "Do you have a problem with it?"

"... No," said Rhys, thinking of the old man from Iceland, telling him to accept all peoples and all loves. "I guess I don't."

Amelia nodded. "If you and I don't have a problem, then you should own it," she advised. "Work with it." She went back to her reading.

"Mom?" he said, and she looked up absently. "I love you."

Amelia smiled. It wasn't something Rhys said openly very often. "I love you too."

Aki and Rhys made out, hard and messy, secretively in corners and behind closed doors. Ironically, it ended up being Aki who couldn't handle the realization that he was gay, not Rhys.

"I - I can't do this -" he said, backing up one night, pained, and he disappeared from their friends group. Rhys never saw him again, and through this he knew what heartbreak was.

He tried his best to repress it, but found depressed emotions were a good deal harder to suppress than any other kind. This puzzled him.

"... I want to not feel," Rhys told his mother one night. "But I can't."

She put an arm around his shoulders. "Sometimes we need to accept feelings in order for them to go away," she said. It was an entirely human concept he had been previously unfamiliar with.

* * *

Rhys tried other parts of Japanese culture, more peaceful parts, in an effort to heal. He visited Buddhist temples, praying and burning incense, purifying himself respectfully.

And he went to an authentic Japanese tea ceremony.

As he kneeled there, purified once more, peacefully watching the green tea be whisked in the bowl - as he bowed when the tea was handed to him, wearing kimono - he felt somehow removed from his past. He felt serene, like all was well in the world once more.

Somehow, this was emotional. Emotion, he learned, could bring harmony and serenity.


	6. Chapter 6

6.

Paris, France was the last stop. Rhys learned French, and visited all the famous cafes and art museums inside Paris, going to theaters both movie and authentic quite often. By now, exploring new places had become his area of expertise. He traversed old cobblestone streets and ancient architecture, sampling French cuisine. The French were very polite, and his already good manners and quiet reserve and intensity were improved there.

He first discovered fashion in France. He took on the alternative look - a long side-swept undercut with buzzed sides and back, and mostly black clothes, slim fit pants and V-necks and crew-necks. He wore a nice dark "casual dress" jacket over his clothes and he had a style. One interesting thing he learned was that instead of cutting his hair, he controlled the style and how long or short his hair was - he could grow and shorten it at will.

He had the money to afford nice clothes, and also a nice car. His Mom took him out driving in the French countryside, and he learned that he was a very cautious driver - if anything, he went too slow, not too fast. Cars behind him honked and his mother got very exasperated with him.

He didn't want to come off too showy, like a rich jerk, so for his first car he picked out a nice black Audi and made sure it had a good stereo system and a port for his iPod so he could play it over the radio. Books soon littered the back seat of his car. Smelling good and looking clean was important to him, so he cleaned his car regularly and put air fresheners inside it.

He had his first sex in France. He was at a bookstore, and a confident, smiling, suave blonde native to France led him by the arm into the back bathroom and they had sex. Afterward, standing there panting, she grinned and told him in French, "Wow, you're surprisingly rough."

He didn't know how to tell her he'd had to exercise great self control not to hurt her.

* * *

At the end, when he was fifteen and a half or so, his mother had a surprise announcement.

"We're going back where you came from. We're going back to the United States. Smallville, Kansas," she said.

His eyebrows rose. "Weren't we being investigated?"

"They've forgotten about you by now, and besides. My sister wants to meet you. She says you can join your cousin at his public high school. We don't have to stay here forever, but don't you want to at least visit the place where your biological parents set you to crash-land?"

"... Yes," he admitted cautiously. "I'd like that very much."

He'd become a bit of a loner. His mother had said Smallville had a way of opening people up. Perhaps the same would be true for him...

Rhys had realized at some point that he didn't know his own way in life. Maybe going to a public school in a small Kansas town, meeting people his own age, would change things for him - show him a path to go. A reason to use his powers, a future he actually wanted.

He had an intuitive feeling about the idea of going to Smallville, and he'd learned to listen to those.

"Yes," he said, warming to the idea. "Let's go. Let's go to Smallville."


End file.
